CSULA Department of English | Comprehensive Examination Reading Lists

British Literature: 20th-21st Century

Period Reading List for Part One Exam

1. Conrad, Heart of Darkness

2. Hardy, Selected Poems

3. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

4. Joyce, The Dubliners

5. Yeats, Selected Poems

6. Orwell, 1984

7. Forster, Passage to India

8. Larkin*, Heaney*, and Gunn*, (selected poems)

9. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

10. Isherwood, A Single Man

11. Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

12. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

13. Caryl Phillips, Foreigners

14. Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Launderette

15. Kazuro Ishiguro, The Remains of The Day or Never Let Me Go

16. Zadie Smith, White Teeth or On Beauty

17. Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

18. Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger

19. Carol Ann Duffy, selected poems

20. Angela Carter, In the Company of Wolves

Selected Text for Part Two Exam

The next time the comprehensive examination in this period is offered, the Part Two text will be

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.